DC's Next Economy Is Already Here — It's Us

BY REBECCA BALLARD

In May, I wrote about a friend who left DC — a family this city should have fought to keep, priced out not by rent but by the absence of the right job. That piece was about what DC should build: the industries that match our values, the neighborhoods that match our lives, the once-in-a-generation opportunity sitting in plain sight.

This piece is about something I've become even more convinced of since: who builds it. Because the answer isn't a corporation we recruit or an industry we import. The answer is already here. It's us.

The asset nobody's counting

DC has absorbed the largest federal employment contraction of any American city. Since January 2020 the District has seen a net loss of about 79,800 jobs, and between January 2025 and April 2026 alone it lost 44,600 — with federal employment down 14.4 percent. Brookings found that 96 percent of the region's 2025 job losses came from federal layoffs. DC's unemployment reached 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026, the highest rate in the country and the only one above six. I've written about the fiscal side of that story. But the deeper story is human, and our economic development conversations keep missing it: the asset we're at risk of losing isn't an industry or a tax base. It's the people.

No American city holds a deeper concentration of purpose-driven human capability than this one. The policy minds. The nonprofit builders. The social entrepreneurs. The creatives who make culture and commerce at once. The international development and finance professionals who've run programs on five continents. The tens of thousands of people — many newly displaced from federal service — who chose this city because they wanted their work to mean something.

And we have to say plainly who is bearing the worst of this. For generations, the federal government was the greatest engine of Black middle-class formation in America — the steady, dignified careers that built homeownership and prosperity across this city and region, and carried three generations of families into the middle class. That engine is being dismantled. Black unemployment in DC now stands at 10.1 percent, the highest in the nation — a crisis that predates this moment and is being deepened by it. Any economic strategy that doesn't put these workers and families at its center isn't a strategy for DC — it's a strategy for a different city, which makes the wounds inflicted ache even more.

Right now, this capability — all of it — is mismatched and unmatched: extraordinary people in roles beneath their capabilities, or between roles entirely, or quietly interviewing somewhere else. And the asset is time-bound. Talent doesn't wait, the AI revolution is compressing every timeline, and the institutions we already have — as currently built — cannot create the jobs we need at the scale this moment demands. We needed to diversify our economy and never did, and now we are more than a year past the moment of greatest crisis. Many of our neighbors are leaving, and those of us who stay bear the loss.

And the competition for these people isn't other American cities — it's the entire world. Canada, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom have all launched programs to recruit displaced American talent. When the world is bidding for your people, matching them to your own economy stops being a nice idea and becomes a necessary retention strategy.

And frankly, I don't blame the cities doing the recruiting, or the people who choose to go. I really do get it.

I understand the pull — personally

I've lived and worked abroad multiple times, and more than once this year I've felt it again — the whisper that maybe the next chapter is somewhere else, somewhere that will better amplify who I am and what I can give, somewhere easier, somewhere safer for me and my children. I know I'm not alone. Many of my friends are running this calculation at kitchen tables all over this city.

This month I flew to Peru to celebrate the wedding of the friend who prompted the last piece. She's my daughter's godmother and truly chosen family. We met over a decade ago in the global anti-trafficking movement, and the city couldn't keep her despite her wanting to stay. Multiply that by ten thousand and you have DC's actual economic crisis — a web of formed, brilliant, beloved people being priced out of the relationships that made them.

My kids have lost friends to this too — families we love, gone to other cities and continents when the work here ended, tears we cry together. They ask about them, and just this week my daughter asked if I could bring back one who now lives abroad. So many of my own friends have moved abroad these past two years — a group as diverse as this city itself. We didn't lose a demographic. We lost a cross-section of our culture, our way of life, and our chosen family.

Here's what keeps me: I love this place. Not abstractly — specifically. I love that my kids walk to school past neighbors who know their names. I love a city where the person next to you at the farmers market spent her career fighting trafficking, and the guy behind you built health clinics on three continents, and where we connect at Protest Pizza over a slice that happens to be called The Ally. I love that DC is full of people who came here on purpose, for purpose — and stayed for each other and for what we are building together.

But love, by itself, doesn't pay for our childcare, improve our public schools, or make a mismatched job market whole. People like us stay when the city we love gives us something to build. That's not a threat — it's the most hopeful thing I know, because it means that after having so much taken from us, the answer is entirely within our power.

The strategy: match our people to what we're building

Once you name the asset honestly, the strategy writes itself: back our own. Make DC the national center for mission-driven business — the place where companies built on purpose start, stay, and scale. And treat the work of the next decade as a matching challenge: connecting who our people are to what our city is building. Retention and homegrown growth first. Attraction follows reputation — it always does.

Four places to start.

Keep and convert the diaspora — all of it. The displaced federal workforce is among the strongest startup and social-enterprise talent pools in America, and other cities and countries are actively recruiting it out of our neighborhoods. But our diaspora is bigger than the federal government: it includes mission-driven professionals in international finance and development, and the international talent ecosystem that has always made DC a global city. A serious city would run the most deliberate stay-and-build campaign in the country: founder support, transition pathways, and a government that says out loud that it wants these people. A global competition demands a global approach — DC should compete for the world's mission-driven talent and capital the way Singapore competes for finance: deliberately, and with the confidence that we have what they're looking for.

Claim and brand the identity no other city can. B Corps, social enterprises, and the creative economy are one connected sector — payrolls, leases, exports, global reach — not a feel-good sideline. The American city that becomes the recognized home of purpose-built business attracts the capital, conferences, and companies no incentive package could ever buy. That identity is unclaimed in America. No city could claim it as credibly as ours — and this September, when the national mission-driven business community gathers here for BLD Southeast at GWU on September 17 and 18, we should say it out loud.

Treat childcare, education, and our young people as economic infrastructure. Friction is a talent tax, and the most under-counted infrastructure in this city is our children — including the young people right now with too little to do and too few places to go. Adults need to figure out jobs and the economy; our schools need to educate and support young people well enough to move into it.

Treat AI as workforce strategy. Whatever you think of it, AI is here to stay, and we have to harness it rather than fight it — I use it in my own work. That means accounting honestly for the externalities and for the people who will struggle most with the change: strategizing now to support workers in the jobs that will disappear, advancing equity through programs like Byte Back, and weaving it into school curriculum. The cities that thrive in the AI decade will train for it deliberately and now, facing the disruption and the inequities head on rather than pretending they aren't coming. DC's knowledge workforce is unusually positioned to lead — but only if the training infrastructure meets the moment, which is why strong STEM for every student in our public schools is a must, now. The next economy gets built by DC's own kids, or it gets imported over their heads. We choose which, starting this budget cycle.

This is our moment

Cities get one moment like this a generation, and the ones that come through don't win by becoming someone else. Pittsburgh didn't out-Detroit Detroit. Seattle didn't chase what left. They became themselves, deliberately — and then the world came to them.

I want my friends back. My kids do too. I won't speak for the people we've lost — their lives are their own, they're building beautifully wherever they've landed, and I understand why they made the choices they made. But I know this: almost none of them wanted to go, and many of them fought hard to stay. They loved this city — its purpose, its neighborhoods, its people — and while I loved them, the city didn't give them what they needed. If DC builds an economy worthy of them, matched to them, some doors that closed will open again, and new neighbors will come too.

It's already here. It's us. And it's time we built like we believe in our power and in ourselves.